Gadget Blog

The fear that our devices are somehow altering our brains might seem exclusively modern. But in 1931, Technology Review published  “Machine-Made Minds: the Psychological effects of Modern technology,” in which John Bakeless explored how machines had transformed the very nature of human thought. here’s what he had to say:

It is a curious fact that the writers who have dealt with the social, economic, and political effects of the machine have neglected the most important efect of all—its profound infuence on the modern mind. Anything that shapes our thoughts shapes society also; and the efects of the machine on contemporary thought must, therefore, be at least as signifcant as its effects on contemporary economics or industry, or the life of society in general.



Even our republican form of government is possible only because a few machines—mainly vehicles (railroads, airplanes, and motor cars) and means of communication (mails, telephone, tele- graph, radio, wireless, and machine-made  newspapers)—bring the minds of a continent sufciently close so that we can live  and work together. In fact, if we may trust Shakespeare, who certainly was not a product of the Machine Age, “there is nothing  either good or bad, but thinking makes  it so.” If the machine really controls our thoughts, no wonder it controls all else.

Consider the mental equipment of  the average modern man. Most of the raw  material of his thought enters his mind  by way of a machine of some kind—often  through the agency of several machines.

Newspapers, magazines, moving and talking pictures are the clearest examples.

All this creates an almost incalculable  diference between the modern mind—the  scholar’s in his study, the technologist’s in  his laboratory, the engineer’s in the feld,  as well as the giggling, gum-chewing shop- girl’s on her way down town in the sub- way—and the mind of the Eighteenth or  early Nineteenth Centuries. For the frst  time, thanks to machinery, such a thing as  a world-wide public opinion is possible.

Quite as significant as the machine- made power of the press and of mechanically reproduced art upon our minds, are  the various mechanical devices developed  during the last two decades for pouring ideas into our eyes and ears—movies,  talkies, radio, and television. Some of these  mechanical devices probably have more  efect upon the less literate levels of modern society than the printed word could ever  hope to have.

The danger is that our minds may be tied down to the machine. Our art may  some day be restricted (as advertising art  always has been) to that capable of mechanical reproduction, our music to the requirements of radio, talkie, and phonograph ...

All because we have misused the machine,  or allowed it to misuse us.

If the world ever realizes that hitherto  Utopian vision of a general difusion of the  good things of life—an ample assurance of  food, clothing, and shelter for everyone, to  which is added leisure for art, letters, pure  science, and philosophy, the gorgeous play- things of the mind—it will have to look for  them to the machine.

That is, it will have to  look to the machine for the economic basis  on which these things must inevitably rest. Strangely enough, we have hitherto  been willing to enslave ourselves to the  machine instead of enslaving it. Most of our contemporary troubles arise from that  odd willingness to allow the machine to be  master instead of slave. If we are to build  a great civilization in America, if we are to  win leisure for cultivating the choice things  of the mind and spirit, we must put the  machine in its place.